Abstract
Václav Havel, besides being a prominent dissident, playwright and the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia, has to be regarded as an original and influential political thinker. This paper will argue that the trajectory of Havel's political thought follows the same path as Michel Foucault's search for left governmentality, i.e. emancipatory governmental rationality that would function at the level of an individual.
Avoiding the pitfalls of the dissident/politician dichotomy (that power somehow corrupted Havel's idealism), this paper will illustrate that the evolution of Havel's political thought (from libertarian socialism, to neoliberalism, to green politics) is a part of a bigger problem facing intellectuals and political philosophers interested in ethical foundation of politics. In recent years an academic discussion has reappeared about Michel Foucault's alleged sympathies for neoliberalism.
His groundbreaking lectures at Collège de France in late 1970s gave a fascinating account of the genealogy of neoliberalism. His alleged sympathies for this new form of government do not stem only from an absence of a normative position during these lectures and his fierce opposition to marxism during that period.
Some authors have suggested that Foucault partly embraced neoliberalism in his search for emancipatory governmentality. His opposition to most of the established left came from its outdated political imaginary and inadequate conception of power that limited freedom.
This task of redefining politics and power through the concept of governmentality unfortunately ended prematurely with Foucault's death in 1984. Similar lens then can be applied to the political philosophy of Václav Havel and its utopian potentials.
Despite being a dissident of a communist regime, Václav Havel was a self-described socialist during that period. Both in his plays and his political writing we find a profound critique of real existing socialism as well as the capitalist West.
Havel is critical not only of the industrial and consumerist society, but also of the anonymous, centralized and bureaucratic nature of the power of the state, found both in the West and the East. Opposed to this he places his hopes into a vision of a civic society, consisting of bottom-up and unregulated free associations, where cohesion would be achieved by individual's sense of responsibility.
It is in this context we have to understand Havel's surprising embrace of neoliberalism quickly after 1989. Beyond the pragmatic reasons of Washington consensus it can be explained through his inquiry for politics based on ethics, a society without a powerful state, where a moral individual would be a cornerstone of power and not its product.
Havel, unlike Foucault, didn't stop at neoliberalism and roughly since 2004 has leaned towards green politics, supporting the czech Green party until his death. Havel's attraction wasn't only founded on the concern for the environment, but also in politics that bound individual by a great moral responsibility, seperate from the mechanisms of the state.
This paper will then illuminate Havel's political thought as a constant search for an emancipatory governmentality, which would be based on an individual bound by responsibility to others, without the anonymous and all-powerful state. This will give a fresh look at Havel's own conception of socialism, neoliberalism and environmentalism, all riddled with their utopian potentials and corresponding doubts.